Welcome

Whats up! Welcome to Wouter’s blog. It’s Friday! That means i’m going to be covering:

• A Person / Media breakdown. Now i got one question

if you wanted to start a ...

• 5 Million in Revenue

• Super profitable

• Very well known

... newsletter in 2024. Then this is the playbook that you can follow.

If you didn't want to do this -- well then you can just click off now lol.

The good thing about this playbook, is that it already exists. So we can look at real data to inform our decisions. It's nearly dinner-time, so in preparation for tonights meal let me set the table.

P.s. follow my twitter here lad.

INTRO
Is this playbook real? Who has done it already?

Now if you're thinking: "the guy who did this was a very rich and extremely handsome before he started". I can tell you only one of those is correct. And good thing for you, it's not the rich part.

Our story begins in August 2018. A Wall Street trader thinkgs it'sa good idea, to create a 5 minute daily newsletter (narrator: a good idea it was).

It's called TLDR (too long, didn't read). It summarizes startup, tech and programming news every day.

It's simple. 5 Links. Every day, on topics you may have missed. It's curation, not content creation. So you can do it in a reasonable amount of time. With AI today it might even be easier than before.

Now it is important that you choose a wide enough topic for your first (yes first) newsletter. You want there to be enough content to curate for a daily frequency. This creates a wonderful habit with readers.

The newsletter topic should also be lucrative enough you can generate ad-revenue largely via inbound. You're lean. You don't want to be doing much outbound or sales.

To generate ad-sales at this level:

• Create in a lucrative enough niche people want to spend money in.

• Automate your outbound on scale via Open Rates.

This eliminate your need for a (large) sales team. You're also curating content, by yourself at first. But eventually you can use low-cost contractors to do the curation. Meaning your two biggest costs in a newsletter business are incredibly low.

You only need to worry about being an above average marketer.
With the amount of content that exists on newsletter growth. If you can't figure growth out that's problematic.

The cool thing about this is that it shouldn't take significant time, capital or expertise to do. It just takes an uncanny dedication to doing the work daily.

This is what TLDR, and Dan Ni (the handsome bloke from before) did. They launched in 2018, have had sponsors like AWS, Asure, Datadog and Loom give them $$$.

On any newsletter TLDR can generate $15-30k!

Ok but what about the early days? How do you grow? Glad you asked! Here's how you can grow the newsletter from 0 subscribers to 1.2Million in a few years. And yes early on you can keep your job.

GROWTH
How To Grow Your Empire

Paid advertisements. For some reason this word has a sticky icky feeling. But why? If i can make a machine that turns $1 into $5. I'd be a fool not to use it no?

Remember, you're running a lean newsletter. You're not spending much time on sales. You're not hiring writers. Your biggest responsibility, number one role. Your North, South, East and West star. IS to be good at marketing.

TLDR attributes much of their growth to paid advertising. Now whilst what worked in 2018 may not work in 2024. The concepts are the same, the places you apply them may differ. (I hear from people Twitter ads are still incredibly cheap/effective).

TLDR didn't start out with the generic platforms like Google/FB. Dan started with places like Reddit.

Note the wording 'efficiently priced', that's cool for Facebook. Less cool for us, it gives you less bang for your buck essentially.

Within the first month of launching Dan was spending $50/day in ads and grew TLDR subscribers to 1K in 1 month. That means for roughly $1,500 Dan acquired his first 1,000 subs. His stirdy base.

Dan targeted the audience based on their subreddits subscription. Here an example of TLDR’s ad on Reddit.

As your budget grows. It's time to graduate and promote on Facebook and Instagram, X and LinkedIn.

There are others thing you can do to grow your newsletter like optimizing landing pages. Mainly for mobile. And things like improving page speed or doing cross promotions.

Now-a-days with tools like Beehiiv boosts and Sparkloop you can grow (and in some cases even make money on growth).

But at the end of the day always follow these steps:

• 1. Curate content well

• Create a clear value prop (stay in your niche-lane)

• Grow subscribers quickly

• Uhm, profit?

How to profit big (The Morning Brew Model)

The benefit of starting a 'somewhat' generic newsletter, like a 'tech' or 'ai' newsletter. Is that you aggregate a ton of people. Within that group, there are sub-groups. Consultants interested in tech. Marketers interested in tech.

This means you can spin up new-newsletters and have thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, subscribers on day one.

For example, you have a tech newsletter with 500k subs. You want to start a marketing newsletter, you promote to your own audience. And boom you now have potentially 125k subscribers on day one of sending the newsletter!

This is the same way Morning Brew is able to buy a subscriber for $2. But, if that subscriber also joins another Morning Brew publication. Effectively, that subscriber only costs $1 now.

And on the back end, that subscriber is in two newsletters, and can see more advertisements. Meaning mo' money for you, at a lower cost of acquisition.

For reference, TLDR current 21 newsletters!

Takeaways (no food just alpha)

1. Focus on Curation and Niche Selection

TLDR highlights the importance of starting in a lucrative niche. With this as a foundation and curating content well you will keep readers coming back. The broad yet lucrative niche is also important for future growth of your other newsletters.

2. Leverage Lean Marketing and Growth Strategies:

This model has two key components. A lean operational structure -- no writers and no sales reps. AND an effective growth channel. So early on, cut costs by automating outbound using Open Rates and being in a good niche.

Then focus intensely on marketing. Using effective and hidden levers to grow.

3. Expand and Diversify to Increase Profit:

Once you've estalished a large enough, and active enough base newsletter. Create sub-niche newsletters to leverage your audience for more revenue and growth.

This will effectively lower your cost of subscriber acquisition, but also increase revenue per subscriber.

More profit and more growth.

It's a pretty incredible flywheel!

Need Help?
Time to help. Need Sales Advice? I got you..

Are you running a newsletter right now and are looking for an external sales-experts opinion on wtf is going on?

I’ve helped sell millions of dollars worth of newsletter advertisements. IF you want consulting advice i’m available for calls.

Reply to this email if you’re interested with your problem(s) + budget.

wait…
BEFORE YOU GO!